The Wisdom of the Measurement Crowd: Building the Internet Yellow Pages a Knowledge Graph for the Internet
Romain Fontugne, Malte Tashiro, Raffaele Sommese, Mattijs Jonker, Zachary S. Bischof, Emile Aben · 2024
The Internet measurement community has significantly advanced our understanding of the Internet by documenting its various components. Subsequent research often builds on these efforts, using previously published datasets. This process is fundamental for researchers, but a laborious task due to the diverse data formats, terminologies, and areas of expertise involved. Additionally, the time-consuming task of merging datasets is undertaken only if the expected benefits are worthwhile, posing a barrier to simple exploration and innovation. In this paper we present the Internet Yellow Pages (IYP), a knowledge graph for Internet resources. By leveraging the flexibility of graph databases and ontology-based data integration, we compile datasets (currently 46) from diverse and independent sources into a single harmonized database where the meaning of each entity and relationship is unequivocal. Using simple examples, we illustrate how IYP allows us to seamlessly navigate data coming from numerous underlying sources. As a result, IYP significantly reduces time to insight, which we demonstrate by reproducing two past studies and extending them by incorporating additional datasets available in IYP. Finally, we discuss how IYP can foster the sharing of datasets as it provides a universal platform for querying and describing data. This is a seminal effort to bootstrap what we envision as a community-driven project where dataset curation and ontology definitions evolve with the Internet measurement community.